


White Lily in September

by Loupmont



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Death, Domestic Violence, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-27 22:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16711468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loupmont/pseuds/Loupmont
Summary: A 70-ish year old Artur reflects on his lover, whose life was claimed by alcoholism. Written from Artur's point of view.





	White Lily in September

A breeze ruffles my graying hair as I gaze out into the courtyard of the monastery. I was here nearly my whole life, aside from the first twenty years that I spent in Za’ha Woods and over a year after on the march through Magvel to defeat the Demon King. I was never quite the same since then, and yet I am also not the same person as I was three decades ago.

I espy a bright white lily in the centre of the courtyard, over a certain grave, and I think back to _him_. I held him in my arms for around twenty years. Twenty years was all I got, and at the end, I lost a part of me.

As I sit back down in my rocking chair after drawing the wooden panels closed, I close my eyes. It helps me remember that disarmingly charming, goofy smile. His eyes, a deep brown like the coffee we both used to drink on our equally dark walnut table that was illuminated by the sun every dawn. His messy hair, which he always bound with a green headband. The soft, dark skin that stretched taut over his muscles.

_Oh Gray, how I miss you._

As the lily wilts and dies in September, so did he.

It started innocently enough, it always does. As we celebrated fifteen years together, he had a little more to drink than normal. He was so sick the next morning that I tended to him as a mother tends to an ill child. When he was well again, he went back. I did not understand, and I still don’t to this day, why he would go back to drinking when he was so violently ill from it. Even as others like him passed through our monastery doors for help, I was never any closer to understanding.

The cycle began anew with each day. He’d leave for the tavern after the household chores and hunting, then he would come back somehow sicker than the preceding morning. I never figured out how he could afford it until I saw some of our belongings being sold at a shop, and a wallet that was clearly not Gray’s in our nightstand drawer. Part of me wanted to turn him in, but I never did, knowing how lonely it would be without him.

Now, _I wish I had_. He might have gotten help if I did.

Our larder became bare after a while. The charity of my brothers in the monastery kept us afloat for those five years, but it wasn’t enough. I knew it wasn’t enough when, as I gazed into Gray’s once friendly eyes, I saw that the whites were yellow. His whole body took on a sickly yellow hue, and he gained weight around his stomach while losing muscle mass around his arms and chest. When he didn’t have a drink in his hand, he was violent. When he did, he was blissful and forgetful. He was not the same man I loved not long ago.

The other monks often wondered why I had bruises on my face, or why I had an angry red ring around my neck.

On that September, thirty years ago, he laid in my arms for the last time. Bile poured directly from his mouth without a heave to bring it up. Sometimes, that bile was mixed with clots of blood. His abdomen was bloated while the rest of him was atrophied. I knew it was his end, though I kept denying it as I held him. I said no words as I no longer felt his heart beating, or when he started to seize. I felt nothing as I wordlessly carried out funeral plans. I grieved for Gray a couple years before, knowing I would never get him back from this disease.

I planted lilies on his grave – white ones to signify purification and restoration of his soul’s innocence. I believed, I still do, that his soul had been restored. No longer was he the dull-eyed, infirm man that laid in his own blood and bile. No longer was he the violent man that left bruises on me. He was once again happy, his soul scoured of the illness that killed him.

He awaits me.

And now, I join him.


End file.
